The style of writing does vary from time to time and often may be viewed as self-indulgent prattling. There are many times I am horribly, horribly wrong or miss certain painfully obvious things. Some would say this adds to the charm. Likewise, grammatical and typographical errors likely abound. There is no excuse for this aside from sheer laziness.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Questing for Lore

Spent most of the time since the last update working on the Loremaster of the Eastern Kingdoms achieve and annoying my friends every few hours with status updates. (“654/700!” “657/700!” and so forth.) I’m very proud to say that as of 11:30 or so last night, I completed the achievement. It has been an incredibly interesting diversion and there was a vast amount of lore I never knew existed, ranging from imprisoned demons to odd portents of the current impending elemental invasion. In my adventures I discovered a flight path I never knew existed in the Burning Steppes, explored nearly every single island on the coastline, and have probably hiked over ever square meter of the mainland…twice. In a way I feel kind of bad for the people that will never see a fraction of the content that’s going to get pulled in a matter of weeks. Not all of it is good, but it adds a depth of immersion to the game that just queuing up for one random dungeon after the next will never provide.

By the time I got to the last dozen or so quests, I had gone past scraping the bottom of the barrel for realistic quests and found myself lost once again in Black Rock Depths to knock out three more tasks for random people. The last six quests, oddly enough, were almost all booze-related.

#6: “Get some holy water from STV to give to the Thunderbrew dwarf in Westfall”. This quest isn’t that bad if you know where the shrine to get the holy water is. It’s the followup quests that are a pain in the tuckus. “Get 3 bags of grain from all over the world.” Yeah. I contented myself with the holy water, which I presume will make a “wholly” delicious booze.

#5: “Collect four different boozes for an innkeeper in Redridge.” Compared to my available quests, this one finally looked really, really pleasant. I had some Thunderbrew Lager that had been aging in the bank for a few months, so it was time to run around Duskwood, Goldshire, and Stormwind to get the other three.

#4: “Kill yet another dude in the Stockades” For reasons unknown to me, it seems just about everybody feels as though locking up criminals isn’t good enough, so for about the seventh time I ventured into the Stockades for a three minute beheading.

#3: “Gather ingredients for some pois—I mean ‘booze’.” This was a quest that Ian had told me about a while back and I had assumed it was Warlock-only, but I was quite wrong. This required a little flight time to not-too-remote regions to hit a couple of sparkly plants and then return back to home base.

#2: “Delive the boo—I mean POISON to a noble in the castle that’s been horkin’ me off.” Right then. I decided to add my own little flair to it. Upon delivering the noxious brew, as my victim guzzled I proclaimed “The Twilight Hammer sends its greetings!” There’s maybe five people in the world that would appreciate that and I’m sure four of them work at Blizzard.

#1: The last quest was found in the same room in which I murdered the nobleman. “Go talk to a woman by that flight point you discovered in Burning Steppes.” Holy crap! A breadcrumb quest?! I missed a BREADCRUMB QUEST? Apparently so. Tickled pink that there was no way I could screw that up, I promptly screwed it up.

I mounted my trusty mechanical emu and rode to the Flightmaster. I hopped on a gryphon for a straight flight path to victory. Along the way, I started clearing out my inventory of useless crap for quests I’m never going to complete and then opened my journal to clear out all the no-longer-needed quests. “Dungeon… dungeon… dungeon… raid… dungeon... dungeon… some painful quest involving trecking to the ends of the earth… another one of those… dungeon…” I then blinked with mute, stunned horror; I had somehow dropped the final freakin’ quest!

I growled at myself until the gryphon landed, ported BACK to Stormwind (I couldn’t imagine doing this achieve as a non-mage), and accepted the quest again. Aha! Although it was a breadcrumb, it was a “raid” quest. After vowing to leave the journal alone, I flapped back to the Burning Steppes, said “O hai!” and knocked out the achievement. I gave the woman a high-five, who seemed perplexed that I didn’t want to accept her quest, rubbed the belly of the dwarf standing next to her (Hey—I earned it! [Other Loremasters will get the joke]), and called it a night.

Next stop: Exodar!

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